L’armée d’Orient, des expériences combattantes loin de Verdun

L’expérience combattante de la Grande Guerre ne se résume pas à la bataille de Verdun ou à celle de la Somme. Les marins et soldats français de l’armée d’Orient connaissent des conditions de combat spécifiques et endurent des souffrances particulières. Les marins connaissent l’angoisse des mines, tandis que les soldats débarqués aux Dardanelles connaissent la difficulté de creuser des tranchées, celle d’un improbable ravitaillement en eau et la capacité guerrière des soldats ottomans, motivés par la guerre sainte. Les parcours d’évacuation des blessés sont encore plus tragiques que sur le front occidental. à bien des égards, les conditions de combat connues par l’armée d’Orient constituent une synthèse entre le front «  industrialisé  » occidental et des fronts de type «  colonial  ».The fighting experience during the WWI cannot be reduced exclusively to the Battles of Verdun and of the Somme. Sailors and soldiers enlisted in the French Orient Army experienced particular war conditions and peculiar sufferings. Sailors were anxious about mines while soldiers landed at the Dardanelles underwent the difficulties of digging trenches and of receiving water supplies. They also faced the war skills of Turkish soldiers, who were engaged in a Holy War. The evacuation of wounded soldiers was even more dramatic than on the Western front. All in all, the fighting experience of these soldiers is a mixture between the “industrialized fronts” in the West and colonial fronts

Les débuts de la Grande Guerre en France : « dictature » imposée du militaire ou retrait du politique ?

Si la loi prévoit bien des transferts de compétences de l’autorité civile à l’autorité militaire en cas de conflit, c’est aussi la personnalité de Joffre et les circonstances du début de la Grande Guerre, qui font l’élargissement considérable des pouvoirs de la sphère militaire au détriment du politique. Des comportements de réseaux sont identifiables, d’autant plus que peu de décideurs civils ont des compétences militaires.The beginning of the great war in France "a prescribed dictatorship" by military policies or a retreat from Politics? At the very beginning of Great War, the French constitution allows the swift of powers between political and military leaders. But Joffre’s personality and the weight of circumstances create very peculiar situation where military staff concentrate most of powers in France, also because there is not a political leader able to drive the War

PLACE DU CAFE DANS LES SYSTEMES DE PRODUCTION DU SUD-OUEST ETHIOPIEN ET IMPACT PREVISIONNEL DES OUTILS DE CERTIFICATION

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceThe role of coffee in southwest Ethiopia's production systems and the forecasted impact of certification projects. Southwest Ethiopia, the genetic cradle of Arabica coffee, is characterized by the progressive transformation of its forests, based on an enrichment of the last on coffee plants and on a lightening and speciesbased modification of the tree strata. The gathering and/or production of coffee, which is almost always combined with cereal cultivation with yoke in open fields and hand tool-based gardening in houses nearby within the very complex local production systems, is nowadays promoted as “forest coffee” or “wild coffee”, appellations that are nowadays used in some certification projects. Also, as a part of the current policies of development of this original product and protection of the forested areas, government allocates big forestry concessions to national and foreign investors. The aim of this communication is to analyse the role of coffee within the diversified production systems of southwest Ethiopia, and the possible effects of “forest coffee” certification projects on farmers' practices, income and socioeconomic differentiation evolution. Forestry concessions evolving into more and more of a capitalistic farming model – based on employment of precarious daily workers – this research work also poses the problem of the absence of fairness in this type of development. It also underlines the risks of the certification process cited above, which includes in the same chain value very different ways of producing coffee – both in terms of the production process and the associated social and production relations – and, in that sense, could create some confusion and, at the same time, could deprive the Ethiopian peasantry of a part of its patrimony

Transcriptomic analysis of the dialogue between Pseudorabies virus and porcine epithelial cells during infection

International audienceBACKGROUND: Transcriptomic approaches are relevant for studying virus-host cell dialogues to better understand the physiopathology of infection and the immune response at the cellular level. Pseudorabies virus (PrV), a porcine Alphaherpesvirus, is a good model for such studies in pig. Since PrV displays a strong tropism for mucous epithelial cells, we developed a kinetics study of PrV infection in the porcine PK15 epithelial cell line. To identify as completely as possible, viral and cellular genes regulated during infection, we simultaneously analyzed PrV and cellular transcriptome modifications using two microarrays i.e. a laboratory-made combined SLA/PrV microarray, consisting of probes for all PrV genes and for porcine genes contained in the Swine Leukocyte Antigen (SLA) complex, and the porcine generic Qiagen-NRSP8 oligonucleotide microarray. We confirmed the differential expression of a selected set of genes by qRT-PCR and flow cytometry. RESULTS: An increase in the number of differentially expressed cellular genes and PrV genes especially from 4 h post-infection (pi) was observed concomitantly with the onset of viral progeny while no early global cellular shutoff was recorded. Many cellular genes were down-regulated from 4 h pi and their number increased until 12 h pi. UL41 transcripts encoding the virion host shutoff protein were first detected as differentially expressed at 8 h pi. The viral gene UL49.5 encoding a TAP inhibitor protein was differentially expressed as soon as 2 h pi, indicating that viral evasion via TAP inhibition may start earlier than the cellular gene shutoff. We found that many biological processes are altered during PrV infection. Indeed, several genes involved in the SLA class I antigenic presentation pathway (SLA-Ia, TAP1, TAP2, PSMB8 and PSMB9), were down-regulated, thus contributing to viral immune escape from this pathway and other genes involved in apoptosis, nucleic acid metabolism, cytoskeleton signaling as well as interferon-mediated antiviral response were also modulated during PrV infection. CONCLUSION: Our results show that the gene expression of both PrV and porcine cells can be analyzed simultaneously with microarrays, providing a chronology of PrV gene transcription, which has never been described before, and a global picture of transcription with a direct temporal link between viral and host gene expression

Colloquium: Mechanical formalisms for tissue dynamics

The understanding of morphogenesis in living organisms has been renewed by tremendous progressin experimental techniques that provide access to cell-scale, quantitative information both on theshapes of cells within tissues and on the genes being expressed. This information suggests that ourunderstanding of the respective contributions of gene expression and mechanics, and of their crucialentanglement, will soon leap forward. Biomechanics increasingly benefits from models, which assistthe design and interpretation of experiments, point out the main ingredients and assumptions, andultimately lead to predictions. The newly accessible local information thus calls for a reflectionon how to select suitable classes of mechanical models. We review both mechanical ingredientssuggested by the current knowledge of tissue behaviour, and modelling methods that can helpgenerate a rheological diagram or a constitutive equation. We distinguish cell scale ("intra-cell")and tissue scale ("inter-cell") contributions. We recall the mathematical framework developpedfor continuum materials and explain how to transform a constitutive equation into a set of partialdifferential equations amenable to numerical resolution. We show that when plastic behaviour isrelevant, the dissipation function formalism appears appropriate to generate constitutive equations;its variational nature facilitates numerical implementation, and we discuss adaptations needed in thecase of large deformations. The present article gathers theoretical methods that can readily enhancethe significance of the data to be extracted from recent or future high throughput biomechanicalexperiments.Comment: 33 pages, 20 figures. This version (26 Sept. 2015) contains a few corrections to the published version, all in Appendix D.2 devoted to large deformation

Automated Quantification of Right Ventricular Fat at Contrast-enhanced Cardiac Multidetector CT in Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy

International audiencePurpose: To evaluate an automated method for the quantification of fat in the right ventricular (RV) free wall on multidetector computed tomography (CT) images and assess its diagnostic value in arrhythmogenic RV cardiomyopathy (ARVC). Materials and Methods: This study was approved by the institutional review board, and all patients gave informed consent. Thirty-six patients with ARVC (mean age 6 standard deviation, 46 years 6 15; seven women) were compared with 36 age-and sex-matched subjects with no structural heart disease (control group), as well as 36 patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy (ischemic group). Patients underwent contrast material– enhanced electrocardiography-gated cardiac multidetector CT. A 2-mm-thick RV free wall layer was automatically segmented and myocardial fat, expressed as percentage of RV free wall, was quantified as pixels with attenuation less than 210 HU. Patient-specific segmentations were registered to a template to study fat distribution. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed to assess the diagnostic value of fat quantification by using task force criteria as a reference. Results: Fat extent was 16.5% 6 6.1 in ARVC and 4.6% 6 2.7 in non-ARVC (P , .0001). No significant difference was observed between control and ischemic groups (P = .23). A fat extent threshold of 8.5% of RV free wall was used to diagnose ARVC with 94% sensitivity (95% confidence interval [CI]: 82%, 98%) and 92% specificity (95% CI: 83%, 96%). This diagnostic performance was higher than the one for RV volume (mean area under the ROC curve, 0.96 6 0.02 vs 0.88 6 0.04; P = .009). In patients with ARVC, fat correlated to RV volume (R = 0.63, P , .0001), RV function (R = 20.67, P = .001), epsilon waves (R = 0.39, P = .02), inverted T waves in V 1 –V 3 (R = 0.38, P = .02), and presence of PKP2 mutations (R = 0.59, P = .02). Fat distribution differed between patients with ARVC and those without, with posterolateral RV wall being the most ARVC-specific area

Integrated hybrid Raman/fiber Bragg grating interrogation scheme for distributed temperature and point dynamic strain measurements

We propose and experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of an integrated hybrid optical fiber sensing interrogation technique that efficiently combines distributed Raman-based temperature sensing with fiber Bragg grating (FBG)-based dynamic strain measurements. The proposed sensing system is highly integrated, making use of a common optical source/receiver block and exploiting the advantages of both (distributed and point) sensing technologies simultaneously. A multimode fiber is used for distributed temperature sensing, and a pair of FBGs in each discrete sensing point, partially overlapped in the spectral domain, allows for temperature-independent discrete strain measurements. Experimental results report a dynamic strain resolution of 7.8  nε/√Hz within a full range of 1700 με and a distributed temperature resolution of 1°C at 20 km distance with 2.7 m spatial resolution

Utility of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance to assess association between admission hyperglycemia and myocardial damage in patients with reperfused ST-Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction

International audienceAbstract: Aims: to investigate the association between admission hyperglycemia and myocardial damage in patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) using Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR). Methods: We analyzed 113 patients with STEMI treated with successful primary percutaneous coronary intervention. Admission hyperglycemia was defined as a glucose level >= 7.8 mmol/l. Contrast-enhanced CMR was performed between 3 and 7 days after reperfusion to evaluate left ventricular function and perfusion data after injection of gadolinium-DTPA. First-pass images (FP), providing assessment of microvascular obstruction and Late Gadolinium Enhanced images (DE), reflecting the extent of infarction, were investigated and the extent of transmural tissue damage was determined by visual scores. Results: Patients with a supramedian FP and DE scores more frequently had left anterior descending culprit artery (p = 0.02 and < 0.001), multivessel disease (p = 0.02 for both) and hyperglycemia (p < 0.001). Moreover, they were characterized by higher levels of HbA(1c) (p = 0.01 and 0.04), peak plasma Creatine Kinase (p < 0.001), left ventricular end-systolic volume (p = 0.005 and < 0.001), and lower left ventricular ejection fraction (p = 0.001 and < 0.001). In a multivariate model, admission hyperglycemia remains independently associated with increased FP and DE scores. Conclusion: Our results show the existence of a strong relationship between glucose metabolism impairment and myocardial damage in patients with STEMI. Further studies are needed to show if aggressive glucose control improves myocardial perfusion, which could be assessed using CMR